CHAPTER XV

NEWS-CROWDS

I have tried to express in the last chapter, some kind of tentative working vision or hope of what authors and of what newspaper men can do in governing a country.

This chapter is for anybody, any plain human being.

Governments all over the world to-day are groping to find out what plain human beings are like.

It does not matter very long what other things a government gets wrong, if it gets the people right.

This suggests something that each of us can do.

I was calling on ——­, Treasurer of ——­, in his new bank, not long ago—­a hushed, reverent place with a dome up over it and no windows on this wicked world—­a kind of heavenly minded way of being lighted from above.  It seemed to be a kind of Church for Money.

“This is new,” I said, “since I’ve been away.  Who built it?”

——­ mentioned the name of Non-Gregarious as if I had never heard of him.

I said nothing.  And he began to tell me how Non built the bank.  He said he had wanted Non from the first, but that the directors had been set against it.

And the more he told the directors about Non, he said, the more set they were.  They kept offering a good many rather vague objections, and for a long time he could not really make them out.

Finally he got it.  All the objections boiled down to one.

Non was too good to be true.  If there was a man like Non in this world, they said, they would have heard about it before.

* * * * *

When I was telling ex-Mayor ——­, in ——­, about Non, the first time, he interrupted me and asked me if I would mind his ringing for his stenographer.  He was a trustee and responsible, either directly or indirectly, for hundreds of buildings, and he wanted the news in writing.

Of course there must be something the matter with it, he said, but he wanted it to be true, if it could, and as the bare chance of its being true would be very important to him, he was going to have it looked up.

Now ex-Mayor ——­ is precisely the kind of man (as half the world knows) who, if he had been a contractor, instead of what he had happened to be, would have been precisely the kind of contractor Non is.  He has the same difficult, heroic blend of shrewd faiths in him, of high motives and getting what he wants.

But the moment ex-Mayor ——­ found these same motives put up to be believed in at one remove, and in somebody else, he thought they were too good to be true.

I have found myself constantly confronted in the last few years of observation with a very singular and interesting fact about business men.

Nine business men out of ten I know, who have high motives, (in a rather bluff simple way, without particularly thinking about it, one way or the other) seem to feel a little superior to other people.  They begin, as a rule, apparently, by feeling a little superior to themselves, by trying to keep from seeing how high their motives are, and when, in the stern scuffle of life, they are unable any longer to keep from suspecting how high their motives are themselves, they fall back on trying to keep other people from suspecting it.